YouTube’s ‘poor AI training and confusing guidelines’ are to blame for the rise of child exploitation videos, according to a new report.
The platform has failed to halt a recent surge in the number of disturbing clips slipping past its computer and human moderators.
These include ‘bad baby’ videos, some of which show young girls pretending to urinate on each other or fishing pacifiers out of a toilet.
Some videos feature adults in frightening costumes kidnapping or mock-torturing children.
Many distressing clips that should be age-restricted are instead promoted to the top of YouTube’s search results, the new report found.
YouTube’s ‘poor AI training and confusing guidelines’ are to blame for the rise of child exploitation videos, a new report claims. The controversial Toy Freaks channel, which featured Greg Chism recording disturbing videos with his children (pictured), was shut down last month
Search quality raters, who rate videos to help train YouTube’s search AI, were interviewed as part of a new BuzzFeed investigation into exploitative videos on the platform.
The report found that workers are instructed to give videos higher ratings – meaning they appear further up search results – based mostly on production values.
One rater said: ‘Even if a video is disturbing or violent, we can flag it but still have to say it’s high quality [if the task calls for it].’
This means that videos are pushed up search results pages even if they contain disturbing content.
Child-exploitative videos are often professionally edited and require more effort to produce, meaning they are frequently marked as having good production values, and so are given higher marks by quality raters.
In a bid to limit these videos, YouTube has started asking raters to judge whether a clip is suitable for 9-to-12-year-old viewers.
Contractors mark videos as ‘OK’ if they think it is child friendly or ‘NOT OK’ if it contains violence, crude language, sexually explicit content, drug use or actions that encourage bad behaviour, such as pranks.
But the rater interviewed by BuzzFeed said the examples provided by YouTube to help them make these decisions are ‘confusing’.
Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood music video is ‘NOT OK’ based on the examples the platform gave, they said.
Videos containing moderate animal violence, on the other hand, are ‘OK’.
YouTube has struggled to halt a recent surge in the number of disturbing videos slipping past its computer and human moderators. Distressing clips that should be age-restricted (pictured) by the site are instead being promoted to the top of search results
Professor Bart Selman, an artificial intelligence researcher at Cornell University in New York State, told BuzzFeed: ‘It’s an example of what I call “value misalignment”.
‘It’s a value misalignment in terms of what is best for the revenue of the company versus what is best for the broader social good of society.
‘Controversial and extreme content – either video, text, or news – spreads better and therefore leads to more views, more use of the platform, and increased revenue.
Toy Freaks (pictured) invented the ‘bad baby’ genre of YouTube video, some of which show young girls pretending to urinate on each other or fishing pacifiers out of the toilet. Some videos feature adults in frightening costumes kidnapping or mock-torturing children
YouTube has become one of Google’s fastest-growing operations in terms of sales by simplifying the process of distributing video online but putting in place few limits on content.
However, parents, regulators, advertisers and law enforcement have become increasingly concerned about the open nature of the service.
They have contended that Google must do more to banish and restrict access to inappropriate videos, whether it be propaganda from religious extremists and Russia or comedy skits that appear to show children being forcibly drowned.
YouTube has become one of Google’s fastest-growing operations in terms of sales by simplifying the process of distributing video online but putting in place few limits on content. The platform relies primarily on users flagging for inappropriate content (pictured)
Last month, the wildly popular Toy Freaks YouTube channel featuring a single dad and his two daughters was deleted.
The channel had more than 8.5 million subscribers when it was removed, though it’s unclear what exact policy the channel violated.
Videos showed the girls in unusual situations that often involved gross-out food play and simulated vomiting.
The channel invented the ‘bad baby’ genre, and some videos showed the girls pretending to urinate on each other or fishing pacifiers out of the toilet.